You need content. If you don’t have anything to say, keep quiet. Many presentations are quite unsubstantial and need a flashy presenter. This doesn’t apply to us.

The content must be tailored to the audience. What knowledge can you take for granted? Underestimate the knowledge, but never underestimate the intelligence of your audience!

Fill your presentation! Every minute they listen to you, should be worth it. Every sentence must be important.

You often hear the first n seconds are important. They are not. Nobody will leave the room after 60 seconds, but often i know after 60 seconds, whether the speaker intends to fill or use his time.

3. Slow and clear

We’re talking technical presentations. Not wedding oration, not sales pitch, not advertisement, not political speech. This means to omit the filling stuff and go right to the core. This should be also true for the other occasions, but it’s essential here.

Don’t say the same three times in a row with different phrasing. It is better

to speak

slooowly

and clearly

one sentence

after another.

Don’t read your content. Not from paper, not from beamer, not from screen. You have practiced enough to know your text by heart, haven’t you?

4. A good presentation has a climax

A good presentation has one -exactly one- climax. Try to summarize your content into one sentence!

Now minimize that sentence! It should have no comma and no “and”. Imagine your audience would memorize only one sentence from your talk – what would that be? You can say this. “If you keep just one thing in mind from my talk, keep this: A good presentation is hard work, no trick.”

A good presentation has one -exactly one- climax. Don’t fear repetitions in this case. A good presentation has one -exactly one- climax.

The climax determines the rest of the content. Thus if you have your climax, you have a criteria, where you could shorten your talk.

5. Humor is permitted

Yes, you can joke. A funny picture to lead to another topic is permitted, as long as it isn’t too much and on topic.

Especially with a technical topic one is ensnared to use bullet points. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t stick. As the speaker, you will read the list point by point, with some intermediary “and” and “uh”, and bore the audience. Do it like Steve, not like Bill!

Animations? Cease and desist!

7. Darned technology

Beamers video projectors and laptops sometimes don’t get along with each other. Computers break. Shit happens.

Show up early and test the real equipment! Don’t trust this test and always carry an USB stick and your slides in pdf form with you.

Live demos are risky because of this. Sometimes it is worth this risk, sometimes it is not.

If it breaks, it’s your fault. Maybe it isn’t, but from the audiences point of view, it’s only you on stage. That directly leads to the next point:

8. Don’t apologize

Who is on stage doesn’t apologize. At least don’t say more than a quick “sorry”.

It doesn’t matter who or what is at fault. It is the responsibility of the speaker to cope with it. It only hurts your presentation in the end.

If you are quick-witted, you may joke about yourself, but return to the agenda as soon as possible!

9. Practice, practice, practice

You can’t practice enough.

The only exception is that you sound like you have practiced more than enough.

If you haven’t practiced enough , you can’t watch your audience. You can read people, whether they have understood, what you just said, or whether you should repeat that. Eye contact happens automatically. Even the “uh” will disappear.

nice article.. i sld have read it before giving presentation for my project.. now when i look down my presentation was more like a social presentation thn technical one

On September 12, 2007 at 6:18 pm garry said:

a friend of mine used to give a lot of presentations, some technical, and some to upper management. he described the difference: “in a technical talk, present one key idea and make sure everyone understands it. in a management talk, present no ideas and make sure everyone feels good about it.”

Great list. If you are presenting for technical training, I would add the use of review and signposting.

Reviewing is obvious. Periodically stop and review the content that you have covered so far. Repitition will help the learning process.

Signposting. Signposting is overviewing the whole presentation, and then referring to this overview as you talk about your topics.
Example – During our talk we will talk about 1, 2, 3 and 4.
After you have discussed a couple of topics. We have discussed 1 and 2, now we will discuss 3.

Really nice. I would add the aspect of the talking itself: eye contact, loud-enough voice, tone. Listening to a presentation in which the presenting tends to murmur to himself or look at the ceiling instead of making ey contact with the audience is certainly not fun! Perhaps you could write a separate article on this?

On September 13, 2007 at 6:17 am mustaine said:

Quite useful tips. i’m also a computer science student and have got my final project coming up in a few months. I have this problem of not knowing what to do for that one… some tips on choosing a topic for final projects, perhaps? :)

On September 13, 2007 at 8:10 pm Jacek Jarvis said:

Hey Andreas,

Cool article. It’s sweet, succinct and sensible…
I’m a comp sci student and newbie part time lecturer, so I’m going to try to keep those tips in mind during my next class.

I’m new to wordpress and I just happened to stumble across this post by accident… But I thought to myself, “what a coincidence!”, since it was only yesterday that I got my hands on an Effective Presentation video course (with Jeff Van West) from Lynda.com.

That course focuses on making presentations in general (not just technical presentations), but I thought it was worth mentioning, since I think it is another great presentation resource. Jeff seems to know what he’s talking about and walks you through a step by step process to go about creating and delivering a presentation.

I’ve barely started the 11 hour course, but he mentioned his 4 rules (which are somewhat similar to the 9 tips you mentioned) and how to go about implementing these rules.

His 4 Rules to Effective Presentations:

1) CLARITY
Knowing exactly what you want to say (and not to say)

2) SIMPLICITY
Keep it as simple as possible for you audience to understand and no more

3) BREVITY
Never use two words when one will do
Remove redundancies.
If there is a second example, it MUST show something new from the first
The second exercise must teach a new task or contrast a last point.